What are people using to play their FLAC collection? Assuming you have one.)

I'm finally taking the plunge and ripping my 300CD's to FLAC using EAC. I want to be able to convert them to a separate library for iTunes so I can have them available to my iPod. What do you use to convert FLAC to:

If you want to use Apple Lossless, I would skip FLAC entirely. Other than slightly better compression, there is no reason to use FLAC initially and then convert to ALAC.

I had a little problem with iTunes destroying my audio library. Probably user error, however I am not wedded to my iPod and I want to be able to have the option of abandoning the iPod and iTunes in the future for some new player. Thus a separate music library in FLAC. Also, I will likely want to encode to iTunes Plus (256 kbps AAC) rather than Apple Lossless, since I will already have the FLAC library. The iTunes is not for listening at home, but for portability.

If you want to use Apple Lossless, I would skip FLAC entirely. Other than slightly better compression, there is no reason to use FLAC initially and then convert to ALAC.

Unless you want to create a proper archive of a CD that can be recreated bit-for-bit, including proper track (non)gaps and index points.

I ripped my entire CD collections as FLAC images for archiving and playback on devices that support that format (e.g., a Squeezebox), and transcoded to ALAC for the car iPod and MP3 for everything else.

If you want to use Apple Lossless, I would skip FLAC entirely. Other than slightly better compression, there is no reason to use FLAC initially and then convert to ALAC.

Unless you want to create a proper archive of a CD that can be recreated bit-for-bit, including proper track (non)gaps and index points.

You can do that just as easily with ALAC as FLAC. The choice of lossless format has literally nothing to do with it storing pregap and CD metadata; all lossless formats will work. Thats what lossless means, they're are identical.

If you want to use Apple Lossless, I would skip FLAC entirely. Other than slightly better compression, there is no reason to use FLAC initially and then convert to ALAC.

Unless you want to create a proper archive of a CD that can be recreated bit-for-bit, including proper track (non)gaps and index points.

You can do that just as easily with ALAC as FLAC. The choice of lossless format has literally nothing to do with it storing pregap and CD metadata; all lossless formats will work. Thats what lossless means, they're are identical.

For me, it does. I wasn't talking about individual songs, but albums. So far as I've ever seen there's no mechanism for ripping an entire CD image to a single ALAC file that can be used to make an exact recreation of that CD (not simply create a new CD based off the album's individual songs). FLAC with an embedded CUE sheet can. ALAC can only be used for individual songs. For many that's good enough. Cool. For some people, including myself, this isn't adequate.

If you want to use Apple Lossless, I would skip FLAC entirely. Other than slightly better compression, there is no reason to use FLAC initially and then convert to ALAC.

Unless you want to create a proper archive of a CD that can be recreated bit-for-bit, including proper track (non)gaps and index points.

You can do that just as easily with ALAC as FLAC. The choice of lossless format has literally nothing to do with it storing pregap and CD metadata; all lossless formats will work. Thats what lossless means, they're are identical.

For me, it does. I wasn't talking about individual songs, but albums. So far as I've ever seen there's no mechanism for ripping an entire CD image to a single ALAC file that can be used to make an exact recreation of that CD

Have you looked? EAC will do this.

There is nothing special about FLAC. You can take almost any instructions for making FLAC images and just swap out the flac encoder for any other lossless encoder and make perfect disk images.

No, any lossless format can be used with a cue sheet. Hell, you can use them with MP3s!

And just so we're clear, you don't actually need to rip your CD to one file. You can use a cue sheet with multiple individual files, one per track. You don't have to do this, but its often easier to work with.

I'm curious how you think it would be possible to even make a codec that could only encode one song per file? I guess some kind of AI that listened to the tracks and disabled the encoder if it caught you appending ?

Have you ever looked at a cue sheet? Its just a list of offsets into a PCM stream (since thats all a CD is). Its essentially format agnostic since CDs predate the existence of modern audio formats. A format doesn't support cue, and cue doesn't support a format. You can convert your audio to any format you want and it will work. You can convert your audio into multiple files and have each file be a different format and it will work. All that matters is that you have a decoder that can produce the PCM audio the cue sheet uses.

I'm curious how you think it would be possible to even make a codec that could only encode one song per file? I guess some kind of AI that listened to the tracks and disabled the encoder if it caught you appending ?

Have you ever looked at a cue sheet? Its just a list of offsets into a PCM stream (since thats all a CD is). Its essentially format agnostic since CDs predate the existence of modern audio formats. A format doesn't support cue, and cue doesn't support a format. You can convert your audio to any format you want and it will work. You can convert your audio into multiple files and have each file be a different format and it will work. All that matters is that you have a decoder that can produce the PCM audio the cue sheet uses.

I now fully plan on submitting patches to LAME and FLAC that has AI that detects song gaps and stops the encoder. It will use a special -OneTrueFileMode cli option.

For playback: if you want maximum flexibility and control of both interface and audio output, and don't mind spending some time to fiddle with it, go with foobar2000. If you just want neat, pretty and easy to use, I recommend Clementine instead.

I'm curious how you think it would be possible to even make a codec that could only encode one song per file? I guess some kind of AI that listened to the tracks and disabled the encoder if it caught you appending ?

Have you ever looked at a cue sheet? Its just a list of offsets into a PCM stream (since thats all a CD is). Its essentially format agnostic since CDs predate the existence of modern audio formats. A format doesn't support cue, and cue doesn't support a format. You can convert your audio to any format you want and it will work. You can convert your audio into multiple files and have each file be a different format and it will work. All that matters is that you have a decoder that can produce the PCM audio the cue sheet uses.

I now fully plan on submitting patches to LAME and FLAC that has AI that detects song gaps and stops the encoder. It will use a special -OneTrueFileMode cli option.

Is it still under active development? The last version was 5 years ago.

I use j.River Media Center. Sadly they've recently taken to being sidetracked developing for the Fisher-Price as opposed to supporting us on Windows beyond truly minor updates, but it's still a decent piece of software.

FLAC is actually gearing up for a new release shortly. The 1.3 beta has been out for a couple weeks.

Generally though for lossless formats, once the bitstream is fixed new releases don't change a whole lot. They're not nearly so complex as lossy formats, so there isn't as much to change. You pretty much have a direct tradeoff between encoder time and compression ratio, so not much to tune.

FLAC is actually gearing up for a new release shortly. The 1.3 beta has been out for a couple weeks.

Generally though for lossless formats, once the bitstream is fixed new releases don't change a whole lot. They're not nearly so complex as lossy formats, so there isn't as much to change. You pretty much have a direct tradeoff between encoder time and compression ratio, so not much to tune.

I'm using foobar2000. Two years ago, I had to install Zune after buying a Windows Phone, I found the interface beautiful and nice, but it won't play anything more than Microsoft's approved formats. From time to time, I try to find a nicer-looking and ergonomically better program to read my music, but so far, I've always reverted to foobar2000 as none of the alternatives managed to meaningfully improves both the looks and the UI.